Bhubaneswar: Noting that artificial intelligence (AI) allows setting new benchmarks in governance and public service delivery, Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi said Odisha must follow a model where the state does not merely adopt technology, but becomes a harbinger of it.
Majhi made the statement at a meeting with a private AI firm Saturday regarding the state’s efforts to build a secure, inclusive, and sovereign artificial intelligence ecosystem.
According to a statement issued by the CMO, the discussions focused on establishing artificial intelligence as a long-term public capability, with emphasis on sovereign infrastructure, population-scale applications across key sectors, and durable institutional capacity within the state.
Apart from Majhi, the meeting was attended by Minister for Electronics & IT Mukesh Mahaling, Chief Secretary Anu Garg and senior government officials.
During the discussions, the Odisha government outlined its approach to developing shared, sovereign AI infrastructure, including secure compute and state-governed data platforms, to ensure that public data, AI models, and intelligence systems remain within Odisha’s trust boundary.
The shared infrastructure is envisioned as a common resource for departments, enabling scale, security, and long-term sustainability while avoiding fragmented investments.
The government also emphasised the deployment of population-scale, voice-enabled AI applications across sectors such as education, agriculture, healthcare, e-governance, and public safety. These systems are intended to strengthen last-mile delivery of government schemes by enabling citizens to access information on entitlements, benefits, and grievance redressal through simple conversational interfaces.
To enable timely implementation, both sides discussed a parallel one-year execution framework, under which departments would prepare datasets, identify priority use cases, and develop applications alongside the commissioning of core AI infrastructure, ensuring that services are rollout-ready without delay, the statement said.
A memorandum of understanding (MoU) is likely to be signed at the upcoming Black Swan Summit in Bhubaneswar, February 5-6.
